In the spring of 2008, Okwui Enwezor organised
‘Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art’ at the
International Center for Photography in New York, an exhibition
that included the same work by Jef Geys that had been on view in
Enwezor’s Documenta11 six years earlier — one of only a handful of
occasions in the last decade that allowed a broader art audience to
acquaint itself with the oeuvre of the notoriously elusive and
wayward Belgian artist. The work, a 36-hour-long film-cum-slide
show made up of tens of thousands of black-and-white photographs
taken by the artist from the late 1950s to the early 2000s, is
titled Day and Night and Day… and in Enwezor’s eloquent
words,

it belongs to this temporal categoryin which the archive is used to elicit the boundless procession
of discrete levels of time, as a juncture between past and
present. […] It is both a personal and cultural
meditationon time and the archive. […] The film
is not only structurally about the flow of images from a time past
into the present; by virtue of its languorous movement, unfolding
one panel at a time, the form of its delivery is also intended to
confound the ability to distil the film into an index of a life’s
work. Working with the basic format of an inventory, in an almost
chronological register, the photographs are activated as moving
pictures by slow dissolves. Nothing much happens in the film apart
from shifts in tone, gradations of muted gray

Geys was never formally (or even informally) involved with
Fluxus, an association he resists for the same reason he steers
clear of the labels of Concept art or Nouveau Réalisme — because
they are essentially disciplinarian art world nomenclatures. It is
perhaps the work of an artist such as Robert Filliou that offers
the most congenial comparative model: even if Filliou, in his
oft-repeated claim that one should cultivate ‘genius without
talent’, still clings (if only ironically) to the dodgy,
classificatory notion of genius, he does so under the aegis of what
he himself called the ‘equivalency principle’, a jokey faux-theory
first propounded in 1968, according to which all artworks are
fundamentally equal, whether they be ‘well-done’, ‘badly done’ or
‘not done’ at all. Another artistic practice rooted in a comparable
set of principles that Geys’s could be linked to in the context of
egalitarianism is that of Hans-Peter Feldmann, who also shares
Geys’s interest in the diaristic (see, for instance, Die Toten
1967—1993, published in 1997), and whose own occasional forays
into autobiography approximate the resolutely proletarian aesthetic
of Al de foto’s tot 1998 as well as Geys’s long-running Kempens
Informatieblad.↑

In Jan Hoet’s landmark 1986 exhibition ‘Chambres d’Amis’, Geys’s
characteristically unobtrusive contribution consisted of printing
the three ideals of the French Revolution in three languages on a
number of doors that were then installed in the private quarters of
those inhabitants of Ghent who had agreed to open their homes to
the exhibition’s scattered art trajectory. However, while most of
the art in ‘Chambres d’Amis’ was shown inside the lavish houses of
well-to-do art lovers (mostly nineteenth-century bourgeois
interiors), Geys consciously chose to exhibit his work inside the
working-class houses that had been left out of the exhibition
circuit.↑

Kempens Informatieblad is a freely distributed ‘regional’
newspaper which Geys took over in 1971; Geys has published a new
edition of the decidedly lowbrow-looking Kempens Informatieblad for
pretty much every exhibition he has done since.↑

Marie-Ange Brayer, ‘De Kleine Identiteiten’, in Jef Geys and
Roland Patteuw (ed.), Jef Geys (exh. cat), Brussels:
Paleis voor Schone Kunsten, 1992, p.4. A more engaging comparison
can perhaps be made with the various early Soviet experiments in
anti-hierarchical, communal art making, with regards to which Geys
himself, in a rare moment of autobiographical candour, has noted
the following: ‘One of the characters from the heroic Russian
period who attracted me the most was Nikolai Ladovsky. At the
Moscow Vkhutemas Vkhtein Insitute in the 1920s he propagated the
synthesis between painting, sculpture and architecture and the use
of psychoanalysis to create architectural space. He was deeply
convinced that good innovative architecture is possible only as the
result of close cooperation between the producer (architect) and
the consumer (the masses).’ J. Geys, ‘Story’, in Piet Coessens and
J. Geys (ed.), Jef Geys: Bienal São Paulo 1991 (exh. cat),
Ghent: Imschoot Uitgevers, 1991, unpaginated.↑

See the following characterisation by Joris Note, one of Geys’s
longtime literary travelling companions (that’s really what he is,
quite literally), from 1990, when the last thing any
self-respecting artist wanted was to be called ‘didactic’: ‘in a
paradoxical, chuckling way, the slightly lawless art of Jef Geys is
didactic’. J. Geys and R. Patteuw (ed.), Jef Geys: ABC École de
Paris, Zedelgem: Stichting Kunst and Projecten, 1990,
unpaginated.↑

If Women’s Questions is one of Geys’s better-known works, this
is partly because the questions continue to be translated in a
steadily expanding number of languages, from French and Japanese to
Arab and Chinese — a different language each time the work is
exhibited in a different linguistic context (the questions
themselves remain the same, not in the least because of many of the
problems addressed in this list remain the same).↑

In the 1966—67 period, Geys had also encouraged his students to
compose a picture of ‘their’ world that could not differ more from
that delivered to us by the institution of geography, however
politically enlightened, inviting them to bring self-made
photographs to their art class for extensive group discussion.↑

Rancière continues: ‘thus the learned editor of the Journal des
économistes has no hesitation about the identity of the German
communist expelled by the French government for his incendiary
writings. Mr Karl Marx, he informs his readers, is a shoemaker.’
Ibid., p.60.↑

J. Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in
Intellectual Emancipation (1987, trans. Kristin
Ross), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991, p.39. Elsewhere
he suggests that ‘equality and
intelligence are synonymous terms, exactly like reason and will.
This synonymy on which each man’s
intellectual capacity is based is also what makes society, in
general, possible.’ Ibid., p.73.↑

Along with that of Robert Filliou (see note 3), the work of
Joseph Beuys offers another interesting set of analogies and
comparisons, and much of their (admittedly low-lying) convergences
concern the status of both writing and the artist’s name, and the
writing of the artist’s name in particular: whereas Beuys’s
signature still bears the mark of the ancient model of artistic
authority and autocratic legitimacy (a whimsical, only half-legible
scribble suffices to ensure the mysterious emergence of value),
Geys’s instantly recognisable handwriting is much more machinic,
consciously de-auratised — everyman’s signature, and all the more
legible because of it.↑

In the words of Marie-Ange Brayer, the exhibition that coupled
Jef Geys with Gijs Van Doorn ‘eroded the polar opposition of art
and non-art by way of a process of homonymy’. M.-A. Brayer, ‘De
Kleine Identiteiten’, op. cit., p.10.↑

Until quite recently, Geys catalogued every single artwork or
artistic act in a chronological list, beginning in 1947 with the
cryptic entry gnomic ‘Brothers of Love (School of the Christian
brothers)’ and ending in 2009 with entry number 665, ‘The Armory
Show New York, Erna Hecey Gallery’. I have used this list, not
dissimilar to works such as Day and Night and Day… and
Women’s Questions in its droning uniformity, as the
primary source for my research into the use of various proper names
throughout Geys’s career. It can be viewed at http://www.ernahecey.com/uk/jef_geys_biography.php
(last accessed on 8 February 2011).↑

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (trans. Sophie
Wilkins and Burton Pike), London: Picador, 1995, p.296. Joris Note
has referred to Musil’s novel in an unpublished text on Geys’s work
that has been a valuable source of information for the present
essay.↑

Events

On Tuesday 8 October 2013, Chris Dercon will lead a tour of the Jef Geys exhibition at Cubitt, London, and for the duration of the exhibition Afterall journal articles discussing Gey's work will be freely available online.